Blog Post Week 12: Afterthoughts of Documentary

For the documentary project, I worked primarily on the narration bit at the end of the video as well as the blog entry. I also gave my input in terms of editing and putting the video together. Reflecting back on the documentary, I feel like the primary sources were not as useful as they could have been. This is because primary for the documentary my group worked on , the narrative was guided by the interviews. I know it was brought up in class today, but I just wanted reiterate that if this sort of project is done again, it would be useful of have some sort of paper or longer blog entry on the background of the documentary is going to be about go into some detail about the sources being used.

Of the sources that were used for the Library Cataloging documentary, I found a lot of interesting information in regards to issues with switching from card cataloging to digital cataloging. Anne Grodzins Lipow in her article, “The Online Catalog Extending Our Grasp,” discussed negatives and positives of libraries switching to the digital catalog. One of the cons to switching to the digital library that she mentions, that was not discussed in the documentaries, that I found particularly interesting was how digitalizing catalogs was problematic from the standpoint that different cataloging programs created vastly different digital catalogs. So a librarian who is familiar with a digital catalog at one university, would be at a complete loss about a catalog set up on a different system at another university. This adds to what was a primary issue for the library catalog transitioning, the leap in cataloging technology.